


we're too fragile to start another fight

by scioscribe



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Boundaries, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 06:36:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6041836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The young men in Washington’s command appeared to hold at once the contradictory beliefs that, in the first place, he was omniscient and that, in the second place, he was too daft to notice what was happening right underneath his own nose; no one epitomized this habit so much as Hamilton, who was at that very moment laboring under the misapprehension that Washington was somehow unaware of the scrape he’d gotten into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're too fragile to start another fight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [herowndeliverance (atheilen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/gifts).



> For [herowndeliverance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/pseuds/herowndeliverance), who also inspired it.
> 
> There's a brief and rather callously done medical procedure in this--the setting of a dislocated shoulder. (Also, do not set anyone's dislocated shoulder like this.)

The young men in Washington’s command appeared to hold at once the contradictory beliefs that, in the first place, he was omniscient and that, in the second place, he was too daft to notice what was happening right underneath his own nose; no one epitomized this habit so much as Hamilton, who was at that very moment laboring under the misapprehension that Washington was somehow unaware of the scrape he’d gotten into. It might have been a compliment—as though he were above such things—if the aftermath of it were not plainly signified by Hamilton’s currently useless left arm laid out across his desk like a slab of meat.

He seemed convinced that if he kept his right hand moving in its accustomed flurry of scribbling, Washington simply wouldn’t notice that he had lost the use of his left.

Washington breathed out through his nose. _I will give him another quarter of an hour to explain this of his own accord. That would be best, he’s so impatient of questioning._

He lasted five minutes in his self-imposed silence.

“Hamilton, come here.”

The boy stood. There was a visible sheen of sweat on his face, and the lines of it were far too rigidly set: the suppressed pain of a man at the surgeon’s with nothing to bite down on but his own tongue.

“Put down the quill, for the love of—thank you.”

“How can I assist you, sir?”

“You may assist me by refraining from swooning. Here.” He moved a stack of Hamilton’s papers to the other side of his desk and Hamilton made a little mewl of disapproval, which Washington ignored. “Lean.”

“I had no intention of swooning.”

“People rarely do. Are you able to remove your jacket?”

“I don’t want to. There’s a chill.”

“Son—”

Hamilton’s mouth bowed in suddenly: he disapproved of endearments even more than he disapproved of his papers being relocated.

Washington sighed. “I can attend to your injury or I can press the question of how you obtained it. The choice is yours, Alexander.”

Hamilton appeared to weigh his options before his good shoulder slumped forward.

“I have some small doubt this will come off in the manner its maker intended, sir.”

Washington nodded. “A paring knife along those stitches there will neatly separate it at the seam—once the same is done to the shirt, we’ll have a better idea what we’re looking at.” He took stock of the frayed quality of the fabric at the elbows and shoulders, recalled Hamilton’s infamous pride, and added, not entirely truthfully, “You were overdue for a new uniform from stores in any case—we can have this one repaired and a new one sent for. In the meantime, you may save whatever tatters you have of this for Von Steuben’s next ball.”

And he would find the funding for Hamilton’s new garb in his own pockets, if only in thanks for Hamilton’s uncharacteristic silence as Washington cut both jacket and shirt off him at the shoulder and levered them down.

The shape was wrong, but at least it was familiar in its wrongness.

“You’ve separated it from its joint.”

He read the agitation in Hamilton’s face like newsprint and quickly said, “It will not be difficult to repair. I’ll take you to the medical tent.”

“I can take myself.”

“On your own,” Washington said patiently, “you’re one man in the roiling sea of a camp.” And a sapling of one, he wanted to add, if only for the pleasure of witnessing Hamilton’s apoplectic reaction. “You may be bumped. If you’d rather hazard that, meeting with a collision, you are capable of not screaming and falling to the ground, thus attracting the attention of all and sundry—”

“I have a high tolerance for pain.”

 _Is that how much you’d like to separate yourself from me?_ He nodded: he too had a tolerance for pain, and wouldn’t recoil at being stung. He had made the offer and done all he could. “Then get yourself attended to, and you’ll wear the sling for as long as the doctor instructs you to, or I’ll know the reason why.” And, though it seemed foolish, for such a short walk—though Hamilton was correct in saying that there was a chill in the air—he picked up the mutilated jacket and laid it across Hamilton’s back as lightly as he could.

Hamilton inclined his head.

And made it, even, to the door of the tent before he said, “Sir?”

His tone all but pled, _Don’t make me ask._

So they proceeded out together, with Washington adjusting the coat as it threatened to slip.

Hamilton let out of a series of staccato breaths that could have passed, taken charitably, for thanks. Washington inclined his head in response.

“The tent is not far.”

“I’m aware,” Hamilton said. His color was high: spots of a raspberry red showed along his cheeks. Washington was thankful to not have that particular problem, because God knew he’d embarrassed himself in his youth enough to have regretted it. “There’s no problem with my _legs_ , Your Excellency.”

“Forgive me. Considering you’d not told me of the injury to your shoulder, or, for that matter, some past wrong to your head that left you briefly lacking in common sense, I thought you might harbor other ills.”

To his surprise, Hamilton laughed, albeit briefly. “Unsporting, sir.”

He never knew with Hamilton. Give him sugar, and he would spit it out; give him salt, and he would lick it off one’s fingers. Washington tugged up on his collar to keep the coat in place.

“Having sworn not to inquire—”

“As you have,” Hamilton said.

“As I have,” Washington allowed. “In any official capacity.”

“You have no unofficial standing.” Hamilton’s tone was still light, as though such rhetoric were a game of chess and the connection between them was taken up in hand as easily as a knight or rook—knight, really, Washington thought, for they moved on such crooked lines. He could not feel that way himself. “Were it not for your office, we’d never have spoken.”

“The ground is slippery just there.”

“I see it.”

There was a little sweat on Hamilton’s face now. Washington tried to measure out how many paces it was yet to the tent.

If conversation would distract Hamilton, he would try it. “There is no saying how two people may meet.”

“I had no society before you.”

“You had your schooling.”

“I was a boy.”

 _You are still a boy_ , Washington thought, _though certainly I’ve suffered for telling you so_. “Then it’s your assertion I provided you with civilian standing as well as military position?”

“Yes,” Alexander said, drawing the word out well beyond its natural length. “You sound unnaturally like a cat who’s discovered cream.”

“A patron is non-official,” Washington said. The temptation was to smile: he rubbed at the corners of his mouth to forestall it. “Consequently, as a patron, by your rules, I might ask how you came by that shoulder of yours. Provided I could guarantee a lack of consequences.”

“Oh, look,” Hamilton said. The flush in his face had returned. “The medical tent, at the very toes of our boots. How fortuitous. Thank you for the escort, sir.”

Washington caught the coat again as it threatened to tumble down. “I have a duty to Congress to safeguard our resources.”

“Only my right hand is a resource,” Alexander said stiffly.

“I might say the same. Inside.”

The physician was unsympathetic in the way physicians generally were, and seemed to have a longstanding acquaintance with Hamilton which Washington could best describe as “weary.” He ignored Hamilton’s shoulder for the duration of a rapid-fire round of questions designed, seemingly, to clarify that Hamilton had not managed to achieve a malarial relapse in March, and then, to Washington’s disappointment, failed to care at all about the circumstances surrounding the wound and instead simply divested Hamilton of his jacket—“Bite down on it if you’d like”—and, with a quick thrust of the heel of his hand, forcibly reacquainted Alexander’s arm with its cup of bone.

Hamilton made a strangled sound into the fabric of his jacket; if his face had burned before, it was ashes now. His good right hand was a fist at his side.

Washington thought, _I am out of all ammunition but anger_ , for there it was, seemingly inexhaustible, in his chest and in his jaw. “That was unfairly done, sir.”

“There’s no good drawing these things out,” the doctor said. “The pain will pass in a moment.”

Hamilton spat out a mouthful of jacket. “If I _shot_ you,” he said, “the _bullet_ would pass in a moment.”

“Hamilton, take a seat and hold your tongue.”

It said much about their present conditions of supply that Hamilton was more easily able to find an overturned, empty box that had once housed bandages than the doctor would have been able to find the bandages themselves; Washington knew it would be best to be lenient. Medical men were thin on the ground, after all. And it was not up to him to question the tactics they used, surely, for each man knew his own profession best. But he couldn’t restrain himself from feeling the thing had been ill-done.

“Sir,” Washington said, armoring himself in politesse, “our men suffer enough unexpected affliction at the hands of the enemy.”

“He did not acquire _that_ at the hands of the enemy,” the physician said, with unpredictable good humor. “He got it—”

“That is not your concern!” Alexander said from the corner.

“It is not,” Washington said. There was enough intelligence and intrigue in war that was valuable in and of itself, but certain information, he thought, was prized only because it could be gotten from particular lips: if Hamilton would not tell him this, he had no wish to know it, at least not at this time. To be admitted into Hamilton’s confidence—not to have someone else betray it—was the hope to be cherished. “Idle gossip has no place here. Sir, with respect for your position and expertise, I will thank you to remember that Colonel Hamilton is deserving of, at the very least, a warning shot.”

The man nodded at last, which seemed to count to him as an apology, and would have to be sufficient. “He’ll need a sling for that, as well. God only knows what you’ll make it from.”

“Thank you,” Washington said. “Hamilton, I believe I have a scrap that may answer your purposes. Can you stand?”

“Once again,” Hamilton said, coming shakily to his feet, “my legs are quite well.”

“You should contrive next to be injured in the mouth. Come.”

Hamilton was able, this time, to affix the jacket securely about him of his own power, though he kept rubbing fixedly at the little mark his teeth and spit had left in its sleeve, and the way he canted a little, favoring his right side as he swung his arms, told Washington he was still tender. But he was quiet—a small mercy. They traversed the route back to Washington’s own tent in silence.

“This scarf, I think,” Washington said, unearthing it from his trunk. “What use have we for silk?”

“I cannot accept this. Mrs. Washington—”

“—has conceived a fondness for you, and would prefer you in good health. Take it, son.” It hadn’t escaped him that Alexander was marginally more willing to receive kindness from women, and he counted the quick knot Hamilton made in the scarf before tossing it over his neck, and fixing his arm in it, to be—sadly enough—one of the better victories of the war.

“It’s strange,” Washington said.

“Sir?”

“The nature of our fight. All the wars of Europe are skirmishes over territory, as this is, but there it is a matter of lines. Our borders are not in question. Nothing has been traversed but our rights.”

Alexander offered him a rare smile, though this one seemed strangely unsure. “You sound like Congress, Excellency. And it is late—very late—to deal with Congress. What makes you think of it?”

“I am unsure.” He sighed. “Dismissed for the night, Hamilton. And if I see you anytime the next three days without that around your neck, I’ll be displeased.”

“Sir,” Hamilton said, nodding. But he paused in the door of the tent. “The question of rights is a question of boundaries, I think, sir, as well as the obverse being true. Sometimes, it’s a matter of what is owed to whom, in geography, fealty, or coin—at other times, something more complicated. Though those are the inalienable bits of it, as Mr. Jefferson would say.”

“Space and fealty.”

“Geography and fealty, I said, sir. Though,” and the color was well and truly back in Hamilton’s face, “space—distance—that is perhaps not inaccurate.”

Washington looked at the scarf Hamilton had consented to bear for his sake, and for Martha’s, and said, quietly, “No.”

“But you were a surveyor,” Hamilton said. “I—I place my confidence, sir, in your ability to determine and respect such things. The lines between respective ownerships and—and trusts.”

To know what was his own and yet—not to trespass.

“I have had some little skill at that from time to time,” Washington said.


End file.
